Companies that use generative AI are still raising enormous sums of money to support their goals in terms of commerce and, occasionally, open source.
With participation from Nvidia and Emergence Capital, Kleiner Perkins led a $102.5 million Series A fundraising round that saw the closing of See Together, an open-source generative AI and AI model development infrastructure firm. According to co-founder and CEO Vipul Ved Prakash, the tranche—more than five times the size of the business’s prior round—will be used to grow Together’s cloud platform, which enables developers to build on both open and custom models.
[Source of Image: Techcrunch.com]
According to Prakash, “both startups and enterprises are looking to build a generative AI strategy for their business that is free from lock-in to a single vendor.” The blog post was posted this morning on Together’s website. Strong foundations for these applications are provided by open-source AI, as more potent generative models are being released nearly every week. Generative AI, in our opinion, is a platform technology that will transform human society over time and serve as a new operating system for applications. There will be both private and open models in the AI ecosystem, thus having options and choices is crucial for the future.
Together, which Vipul co-founded with Ce Zhang, Chris Re, and Percy Liang, was introduced in June 2022. Before being bought by Apple in 2013, Prakash founded the social media search company Topsy, where he subsequently rose to the position of senior director.
Prakash, Zhang, Re, and Liang are working together to develop open-source models and services that assist businesses in integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into their applications. To achieve this, the co-founders of Together claim to have created a cloud platform that provides scalable computing at a cheaper cost than the leading providers (e.g., Google Cloud, AWS, Azure) and is suitable for executing, training, and optimizing open source models.
Together, Together runs a cloud that spans data centers in the EU and the US, including servers run by partners Crusoe Cloud and Vultr, and provides a total of about 20 exaflops of computing. Pika Labs, NexusFlow, Voyage AI, and Cartesia are a few of the clients that use Together’s model-serving APIs.
Vipul went on, “We can offer significantly better economics on pre-training and inference workloads by building custom infrastructure.” Developers may rapidly and simply integrate popular open-source models using the Together AI platform, or they can build their own models by fine-tuning or pre-training them. Because of Together AI’s industry-leading performance and dependability, our customers pick us to handle their generative AI workloads. They also feel secure knowing that they own the outcome of their AI investment and can run their models on any platform at any time.
In addition to the cloud service, Together provides a consulting service known as Custom Models, which enables users to upload their own data to the Together cloud platform and have Together’s staff create, develop, and test a model using that data.
jointly makes significant investments in AI research. RedPajama, one of the startup initiatives of the firm, seeks to develop a collection of open-source generative AI models, including “chat” models similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Together has also released OpenChatKit, an attempt at a ChatGPT comparable, GPT-JT, a fork of the open-source text-generating model GPT-J-6B (from the open research organization EleutherAI), and a refined version of Meta’s Llama 2 text-generating model.
[Source of Information: Techcrunch.com]
